


We're... Us (The One With The Eggs Benedict)

by PseudoLeigha



Category: Leverage
Genre: Eggs Benedict, I wrote this way before I started that series, Murder, Not actually one of the 2AM conversations, Posted by request for tigerlilyschild
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-21
Updated: 2017-04-21
Packaged: 2018-10-22 01:03:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10686582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PseudoLeigha/pseuds/PseudoLeigha
Summary: Takes place after 05x01. Parker and Eliot talking about murder and what it means to be a good (or bad) person. NOT a 2AM Conversation. I wrote this way before starting that series, before I had quite locked down what I wanted to do with Parker and Eliot's relationship. Posted by request.





	We're... Us (The One With The Eggs Benedict)

“His leg’s broken,” she had said, sounding more lost than Eliot had ever heard her sound. “He died in here, alone.” He answered without thinking much, explaining why and how to fill the silence, to reassure her (and himself) that they, unlike the target, weren’t going to die. There were two of them, they were solid climbers, and, if all else failed, Hardison knew their location. The team wouldn’t leave them to freeze.

“And him,” she had said. “He’s coming with us.” There was no room for argument in her voice, no sign of the playful, childish girl who had laughed to wake him not two minutes before by flashing a strobe light in his face. It was, he admitted, probably a good idea. Nobody deserved to lie unmarked and alone, in a cave under the ice. He knew most of the work of dragging the body down to the High Camp would fall on him – the regulator on the oxygen tank had broken in the fall, so Parker wouldn’t be up for any heavy work, even going downhill – but he would do it, if they could manage it without wasting too much time.

_“Alan,”_ she had called him. Eliot had almost groaned aloud, had almost asked her if this was just because she was suddenly seeing the potential in every crazy stunt she had ever pulled for her to end up like him, dying broken and alone after a fall. He held his tongue because this wasn’t the time for that. Trust Parker to suddenly decide to start empathizing with targets when they were 12,000 feet above sea level and trapped in a crevasse. Crazy girl.

“I want to do the right thing,” she had said. Shouted, more like. Almost hysterically.

Maybe they could have done it. Eliot didn’t know for sure – climbing was Parker’s business, and she might well have been able to rig a deadlift harness with the broken, leftover rope, using the one from the first harness to lift themselves out. But that would take time, and the walls of the crevasse did not provide enough insulation to make up for the lack of wind. If they didn’t keep moving, keep warm, frostbite could set in before Nate and Sophie got a rescue party out to them, and for all she had managed to keep up with the frankly punishing pace he had set on the way up, it was quickly becoming clear that Parker wasn’t anywhere near acclimatized. If they didn’t get back to lower elevations soon, Eliot would like as not be hauling her off the mountain, rather than the dead man.

“We don’t have the time, Parker!” he growled at her. He wasn’t just referring to the dead man. She might be insanely disciplined when it came to her work, but when it came to dealing with emotions, even after years of interacting with the team, she was still a mess, and this was neither the time nor the place for a breakdown.

Parker glared at him. She knew there was no time. She didn’t know much about mountains, but she knew what oxygen deprivation felt like, and she could tell her thoughts were starting to get slow and disorganized. She was already checking the rope in her hands as she coiled it – you should never abandon supplies you might need later. She had taken nearly ten minutes rigging the body up in the first place. (Frozen people turned out to be both heavy and awkward.) Figuring out a new harness would take even longer, especially since it was getting hard to think straight, and there would be no time left to rig a pulley to get him out, even if she could find the spare rope.

“Strip him,” she ordered, nodding at Alan, mentally kicking herself for letting Eliot check the first rope and Eliot for missing the flaw in the first place. To snap so quickly, even on the sharp edge of the ice, there should have been obvious signs of wear before he set the grapple. Not only had he ruined their chance to retrieve the body, but she was lucky she had only been a meter up. If she had been higher, she could easily have broken a leg or twisted an ankle herself. It wouldn’t be the first time – cat-burgling was a tough business to learn – but it would make getting off the mountain twice as difficult. There were still days when she really had to think about whether trusting her team was a good idea. (She would realize later, at lower altitudes, that the rope had to have been cut by the Russian – even Hardison couldn’t have missed a rope _that_ frayed.)

Eliot did as he was told, working quickly and silently. Parker checked the second rope carefully before he sent it up. They propped the body against the wall, covering his face again before they made their ascent.

“Hey,” Eliot said, in a tone Parker was about ninety percent sure was meant to be comforting. “It’s a good thing it was us.”

“Because we’d leave him?” she questioned, her expressionless tone the closest she ever came to sarcasm. It was the voice she used when she didn’t really agree with what she was hearing, but didn’t want to say so. Nate and Sophie were nearly as pragmatic about their own safety as she and Eliot. Maybe more than Eliot. She was pretty sure either of them would have left the body, too, if it was their lives at stake. She and Eliot were just the only two members of the team fit enough to pull off this little day-trip.

“Because they would have kept trying,” he nodded. “And they would have froze to death, right next to him. Especially Hardison. So it’s a good thing it was us. The two of us, we do things they can’t. Won’t.”

Parker once told the team that she never hurt anyone, but she was pretty sure that Eliot was hinting he knew that wasn’t true. “That make us bad?” she asked, not changing the subject, hoping that he would give her his usual cock-eyed smirk and a quip about how they were bad to the bone, but that was a good thing, followed by a gruff ‘Let’s go, we’re burnin’ daylight, Parker!’ There would be time later to find out exactly what he knew.

“It makes us… us.” She could tell by the long, tense pause that he thought they were still bad people (even if they were now bad people doing bad things for good reasons), but then, she already knew that, as sure as she knew there was not enough time or rope to get the body out. “Now you can take that as a gift,” he continued, unexpectedly serious, “or you can take it as a curse. And that’s up to you.”

It wasn’t a gift, she thought, or a curse. Just the way things were. But she was trying to change, to be the good guy Nate insisted she was as part of the team, the sweet, naïve girl Hardison was in love with. She was trying to learn to trust their dysfunctional little family and leave the worst parts of her past behind her (or at least learn to build a character that matched their expectations). She really did want to do the right thing, even if she wanted it to make Nate, Sophie and especially Hardison happy, not just because she knew it was right. That was why she said, “Wait.”

…

Two days later, safely back in Boston, Parker let herself into Eliot’s apartment. She didn’t normally visit him any more than he visited her, since they were both at Nate’s more often than not, but she had made a point of checking up on all of her friends? Coworkers? Family? The Team, anyway… every so often. (Read: breaking into their homes and snooping.)

Eliot’s space was not as Spartan as her warehouse, though it was the closest of all the team’s residences. She didn’t like it. The ceilings were too low, and there were no good places to hide. She was pretty sure he had chosen it for that reason. It had an open floor plan, the kitchen separated from the living space by a glass dining table. Only the bedroom and bathroom had doors, and they were recessed, sliding things, rather than the swinging sort that could give a girl a bit of cover. The desk and television stand had thin metal legs with no solid sides, his shelving units went all the way to the ceiling, flush with the walls, and his bed sat directly on the floor. His shower was glass-walled, with an in-line heater so there was no water heater closet. There was only one window, in the bedroom, which opened onto the brick wall of the next building, only three feet over. It was convenient for a quick get-away or covert entrance, but protected from snipers or (most) observation.

His kitchen was very, very well equipped (though many of his special dishes and tools had migrated to Nate’s over the years), and he had managed to amass an impressive collection of books aside from those related to killing and cooking, mostly philosophy and novels. Aside from that, there were no personal touches anywhere – no keepsakes or letters in any of his drawers, no photos or posters on the walls. The few electronics he owned – TV and desktop computer – were good, but not great. There were knives hidden strategically around the apartment, and one pistol with no bullets, kept in a box in the lowest drawer of his dresser.

There were spare keys on a hook next to the front door. One opened the roof access stair, allowing the man to reach the small kitchen garden he had created there. A second was for the storage space where the Challenger lived when not in use. There was a third key hidden in an old spice bottle in a cupboard, which belonged to a warehouse not far from her own. This concealed a gym with weights and punching bags, an open, dojo-type of area, a very small, very well-soundproofed shooting range (although Eliot said he hated guns, he was just as good at using them as he was every other kind of fighting), and a truly impressive collection of weapons from around the world.

Based on previous surveillance, at four in the morning, there was a ninety-five percent chance that Eliot would be home, and a seventy-five percent chance he was already awake, or would be within half an hour. He might have been joking when he told Nate he only slept an hour and a half a night, but he did seem to suffer from insomnia and nightmares. Sure enough, when she came through his window, he was in the kitchen making some sort of complicated breakfast food. She only just managed to duck the knife he sent spinning in her direction as she stepped into the open room.

“Damn it, Parker!” he scowled (she wasn’t sure if it was because she was there at all, or because she’d made him miss his mark with the knife). “What are you doing here?”

She shrugged and retrieved the thrown blade before seating herself on an unused section of the counter. She was there because she thought they needed to have a talk, but she didn’t really know how to start it.

He snorted, “So you thought you’d just stop by at four in the morning? Through a window? There’s something wrong with you.” He returned to making some kind of sauce with an irritated eye-roll.

The familiar complaint drew a small smile from the thief. “I’m not insane, Eliot.”

“Well, you’re sure as hell not normal.”

“I never said I was. I’m a bad person, and you know it.”

“Oh, Jesus, you’re still on that? Listen, we might not be good people, but –”

“No,” she interrupted, balancing the knife on one finger and then flicking it into the air. “You don’t have to pretend for me. You said we were just ‘…us,’” she said, making finger-quotes with one hand and palming the blade with the other, “but you meant we’re bad people.”

“You really want to talk about this?” the hitter asked, cracking an egg into a bowl and then sliding it into a pot of simmering water.

“No.”

This earned her a raised eyebrow. _What are you doing here, then?_ He threw a piece of ham into a frying pan and pulled a toasted English muffin from the oven, waiting for her to continue.

She did so reluctantly. “I think we maybe kinda need to?”

“Parker…” If Eliot was the kind of person who ever whined, the way he drew her name out might have qualified.

By the time she figured out what she wanted to say, his eggy-muffin thing was fully assembled and halfway eaten, and she had helped herself to yogurt and granola, which was the closest thing he had to normal cereal.

“You said we do the things the others can’t, or won’t.”

“Yeah, well…” Eliot hedged, “They get emotionally involved.”

“We all have.” Parker herself had run off to try to save those orphans from the gunrunners in Serbia, and Eliot had almost gotten Hardison killed when they were dealing with Moreau. She trapped herself in that thrice-cursed building trying to help Archie, and he had gotten distracted on a mission at least once trying to help an abused civilian kid on the side.

“Nate still thinks of himself as a good guy, and Sophie and Hardison are too soft-hearted to make tough calls, let alone carry them out,” he clarified, finishing his breakfast. “Look, if one of us was going to die, and you had half a second to decide who, who would it be?”

“How?”

“I dunno, Parker. Say you had to push me in front of a train to save yourself. Would you do it?”

He was watching her face closely as she said, “Yes.”

He nodded. “What about Archie?”

This one was harder. Archie was the closest person she had to a real father. He knew her even better than Nate and Sophie. But he had made her what she was, and he would be disappointed if she saved him at her own expense. He had actually _yelled_ at her over Wakefield, and Archie never yelled. “Yes.”

Eliot nodded again. “What if you had to choose to save either me or Hardison?”

“Are we on a job?”

“Sure.”

“Do I need your skills or his more to get out?”

“Mine.”

“Then I’d save you.” _Obviously_.

Eliot bared his teeth. It wasn’t a smile. “That’s the difference. If I asked Sophie to choose between you and Hardison, or Nate to choose between Sophie and Maggie, they would freeze. We don’t hesitate.”

Parker nodded absently. It was good to know that he hadn’t meant that he knew anything about her past other than what she had told him when he said they were the same, but that wasn’t really the reason she was there. She had been thinking a lot about what had happened up on that mountain, about the things he had said, and why he said them.

Parker hadn’t been worried about being bad people. She had learned (slowly and sometimes painfully) to be the kind of person who could get along with the team, and it was hard sometimes, but she wasn’t ashamed or guilty about her past. Eliot clearly thought she was. “Does that make us bad?” It did. He obviously thought so. But instead of owning it with his usual bad-ass bravado, the former hitter had hesitated, denied it. From all Sophie had told her, that meant Eliot was probably ‘projecting’ his own feelings onto her. Silly thing to do, in her opinion, but then, no one had asked her.

All that meant was that Eliot thought _he_ was really a bad person, and that wasn’t okay, because it wasn’t true. Parker liked Eliot too much (against her better judgement) to let him go around believing something so wrong about himself.

He stood to clear the table, but froze when she said, “You told me, if I asked, you’d tell me the worst thing you ever did.”

“Are you asking?” His voice was as cold as she had ever heard it.

“Yes.”

He set his plate back down, and moved to the sofa as though in a trance. She followed him, curious. “There are three things that are the worst, for different reasons,” he said, in the harsh voice usually reserved for work. “And I did them all because of Moreau.” She settled on the other end of the couch, perched on its arm, and he met her eyes squarely as he counted them off. “The thing I’m most ashamed of now is trying to take my own life, about nine years ago, after my first job for him.”

He slid up his left sleeve to bare two long, slivery scars. Parker shivered and pressed the cold flat of the blade she had commandeered against a matching scar on her own wrist, smaller and much older, but still visible in the right light. Eliot’s eyes flicked down, reflexively following the movement of the weapon, but he ignored her response.

“Nate would say the worst thing I ever did was torture a child to get his father to give me the information I needed. When I had the information, I killed the boy, and let the man go, because my orders were to hurt him in the worst possible way.”

She nodded slightly, acknowledging both the effectiveness of the play and the horror of it. His eyes narrowed, most likely in disapproval at this response. She gave a mental shrug. He could add it to his list of things that were wrong with her.

“And… you would say the worst thing I ever did was… I helped kill everyone in a tiny South American village over the age of ten. Orders were to take out anyone who could fight back, but we left a whole town full of orphans in our wake.” It wasn’t until she jerked back, sitting up straight in shock that she realized she had been leaning forward with interest.

She gaped at him for nearly a whole minute before she managed to find words. She wasn’t sure what she had expected his worst thing ever to be, but orphaning an entire town wasn’t it. He was right that she thought that worse than trying to kill himself or torturing a single child (and parent), but it was a long time ago, and he wasn’t that person anymore. She thought the point she was going to make still stood. Just to be sure, though, she asked, “Why?”

“I ask myself that every goddamn day, Parker. Every. Goddamn. Day.”

“Do you… You feel bad about it? About the things you’ve done?” From what he had told her after killing Moreau’s goons, she was pretty sure he did.

“Yes,” he bit out.

“And that’s why you don’t kill people anymore? Because you feel bad about the things you did for Moreau? And you don’t want to do anything like that again?”

He shrugged, then said, “Yes,” again.

She shrugged back. “Okay.” Another minute passed in silence as Eliot slowly un-froze.

“Why are you asking now?” he finally asked.

“I…” she began, and then started over. “Do you ever still want to kill people?”

“Sometimes,” he answered evenly.

“But… you regret it.”

Eliot raised an eyebrow at this, no doubt wondering where she was going with this.

She continued before he said it. “We’re not the same, Eliot. Yes, we’re the ruthless, pragmatic half of the team, and we know our priorities, but you’re not a bad person, for all you’ve done bad things.”

“Parker…”

“Don’t ‘ _Parker’_ me!” she snapped, glaring heatedly at the man. “And stop looking at me like I’m too adorable to know what I’m saying.”

“Ah don’t think you _do_ know what you’re sayin’!” he snarled back, his southern accent becoming more pronounced with his anger. “You’ve never seen the kind of suffering I’ve caused, Parker!”

“Says who? I’ve been _everywhere_ , Eliot. I _lived_ the kind of suffering you’ve caused.” That cut off his attempts to interrupt. “Isn’t that why you thought I’d say orphaning that village was the worst thing?”

Eliot hesitated for a long moment, obviously struggling to reconcile that fact, though it seemed like a logical conclusion to Parker. Finally he said, still angry-sounding, “Yeah. So where do you get off saying it’s not bad?”

“I’m not saying that! You’re not _listening_. Just because you’ve done bad things doesn’t make you a bad person. We’re _not the same_. That’s what I’m trying to tell you!”

Eliot scoffed at her. “So I’m not a bad person, but you are?”

“Exactly.” Parker nodded, relieved that he finally seemed to be getting it. “You feel bad about the people you’ve killed. I don’t. I know I should. The others would say I should. But I don’t. I mean, I feel kind of bad about the guard in Trinidad, because I messed up. I should have been good enough to get away without hurting him, let alone killing him, but he grabbed me and I panicked. My foster parents… the few bums and older kids who attacked me when I was living on the streets…” She shrugged. “You’re not surprised.”

Eliot crossed his arms and settled back in his seat, an unreadable expression on his face. “Nope.”

That, she thought, was somewhat of a relief. “I didn’t think you would be. Up in that cave, I thought you were saying you knew.”

“I suspected.”

“How?”

Eliot almost-smirked, but there was no amusement in the expression. “There’s something wrong with you. No one grows up in the system and on the streets as innocent as you pretend to be.”

“Hey!” she had to object, “Team Player Parker really is that innocent!”

The hitter shook his head. “You were ready to kill us after that first job went south. You nearly killed Tara when you thought she betrayed us,” he reminded her.

“Oh, yeah,” she winced. “I forgot about that.”

Eliot sighed. “You thought she deserved it, right? Listen, Parker… You’re not a worse person than I am. Righteous kills and self-defense, even accidents and botched jobs… they aren’t the same as killing for money. The kills I regret are the ones that _didn’t_ deserve it, the ones whose lives I ended just because they were in the way and someone else had enough money to ask me to remove them.”

Parker snorted. She couldn’t help it. Eliot was funny when he was talking about his old work, and even funnier when he bought into the act and forgot she wasn’t really all that innocent. She was telling him straight to his face, and he still wasn’t getting it.

“What?” he growled.

“You think nobody ever asked the world’s greatest thief to steal a life?” she smirked.

“You? An assassin? Seriously?” He raised an eyebrow like he didn’t believe her.

She shrugged. She didn’t really _think_ of herself as an assassin, given that she had only killed three times for money, but she supposed the title did technically fit. “Damascus and Istanbul 2004, and Zurich 2005 were mine.”

“Gruber was _you_? I thought one of the Germans did it. I turned it down because security was too tight!”

Parker shrugged again. She had been in the area scouting the new Swiss standards for banking security, and the money had been too good to resist. “Not compared to their vaults. People are hardly ever as well-protected as jewelry,” she informed him. “That’s why I only ever stole a few.”

“You’re serious? You’re insane. You don’t kill people for the challenge, Parker!”

“Well, technically, I killed them for the money,” she pointed out, “but it was kind of boring, so I only did it if there was a _lot_ of money. Besides, tazing them is more fun. And I’m not insane, Eliot.”

“You’re fucking crazy. Give me my knife back.”

She was still playing with the sharpened strip of matte-black metal, making it appear and disappear between her hands, much like the card tricks Nate was so fond of. “But Eliot…” she whined.

Eliot cut her off. “No buts. Hand it over.”

“Ugh, fine!” she tossed the blade at him, lofty and side-on. She could always steal one on the way out if she really wanted to bug him. He plucked it neatly out of the air with another glare. “It’s not like I was planning on trying to stab you. It’s not like you’d let me, either,” she affected a pout.

“Stop fooling around, Parker.”

“Fine!” she snapped, letting the playful façade fall. “I’ve already said what I thought you needed to hear, but I’ll say it again, because I don’t think you heard me. Contrary to popular belief, I do actually know right from wrong, and good from bad, and you, Eliot Spencer, are not a bad person,” she concluded sternly. With that, she got up and let herself out, the same way she had come in. If he didn’t get it by now, she couldn’t think of anything else to say to make it clearer.

…

Eliot was making Eggs Benedict when Parker wandered into his apartment. He threw the first knife before he recognized the identity of the intruder, and he felt that it was to his credit that he refrained from throwing a second one when he realized who it was. It would have served her right, sneaking up on a man in his own home in the middle of the night. Still, it was probably just as well she managed to dodge. The rest of the team would have been pissed if he put their pet thief out of commission.

“Damn it, Parker!” he scowled at her. “What are you doing here?” The last thing he needed on a night like this – one that started with insomnia and ended with nightmares – was the bubbly blonde bouncing around, asking her usual stupid questions and getting her sadistic rocks off by annoying him to the breaking point.

She shrugged and hopped up to take a seat on his counter – his _clean_ counter – without a word. _Fucking great,_ he thought _, it’s going to be one of those conversations._ Aloud, he snorted and said, “So you thought you’d just stop by at four in the morning? Through a window? There’s something wrong with you,” before he returned to his Hollandaise sauce.

She smiled at that – she never did when he said it in front of the others, but in private, she let him see that she didn’t really take it too seriously when he told her she was nuts. In fact, he was fairly certain she took it as some sort of twisted compliment, much like when he failed to put her in a joint-lock because she was just too damned flexible, and he complained about how real people didn’t move like that. Either that or she thought it was funny that Eliot would point out things that were wrong with anyone else when he was nearly as fucked up as she was, albeit in different ways.

“I’m not insane, Eliot.”

Eliot almost laughed at that. She was arguably more functional than Nate three days out of five, but he had met psychopaths with a better understanding of emotions and more self-awareness than Parker, and child soldiers who were better-socialized.

“Well, you’re sure as hell not normal.”

“I never said I was. I’m a bad person, and you know it.” It might just have been Eliot’s well-trained paranoia talking, but he thought there was a hint of ice in her voice when she said _and you know it_. He didn’t really think of her as _bad_ , just emotionally unstable and unpredictable in any context other than a job. He thought he was perfectly justified in his wariness, especially since it had not escaped his attention that she was still playing with the throwing knife he had flung at her. Still, if she was still thinking about what had happened up in that cave, he had to say something.

“Oh, Jesus, you’re still on that? Listen, we might not be good people, but –”

“No. You don’t have to pretend for me. You said we were just ‘…us,’” she said, making finger-quotes like Hardison had taught her, “but you meant we’re bad people.”

That was… unusually perceptive of her. “You really want to talk about this?” Eliot asked, expertly poaching an egg.

“No.”

He gave her his patented ‘get on with it look’ and continued with his breakfast, pointedly not offering to make one for her as well. He hadn’t invited her in, after all.

“I think we maybe kinda need to?” she offered after a moment.

“Parker…” He wouldn’t tell her no, because he knew that coming to talk to him – to anyone – about something like this counted as a huge breakthrough for the thief, but he really, really didn’t want to talk about it on a morning like this, and he wasn’t in the mood for her usual games at all. He waited patiently for her to say whatever she needed to while he finished cooking and started eating, not complaining when she helped herself to his granola, and even refraining from comment when he realized that she knew where the bowls were, damn it! He knew, of course, that this wasn’t the first time she had broken into his place – it wasn’t even the first time she had done so while he was there, or the first time he had thrown a knife at her in response – but she didn’t have to be so _obvious_ about it.

Eventually she spoke again. “You said we do the things the others can’t, or won’t.”

“Yeah, well… They get emotionally involved.” Eliot had trained himself, first in the military and then afterward, freelancing, to make tough calls and carry out horrifying orders without letting emotions interfere. He, like most soldiers, had hesitated the first time he had to kill an enemy in combat. Most people found it wrong on an instinctive level to attempt to kill another human being. He really did not want to admit, to Parker or anyone else on the team, that he suspected their crazy little thief was one of the few who wouldn’t have hesitated in the slightest.

“We all have.”

Well, crap. She clearly thought he meant emotionally involved in their jobs. He would have to clarify. “Nate still thinks of himself as a good guy, and Sophie and Hardison are too soft-hearted to make tough calls, let alone carry them out.” She clearly still wasn’t getting it. “Look, if one of us was going to die, and you had half a second to decide who, who would it be?”

“How?”

“I dunno, Parker. Say you had to push me in front of a train to save yourself. Would you do it?”

She didn’t bat an eyelash as she said, “Yes.”

He nodded. It was no more than he had expected. “What about Archie?”

This one she obviously had to think about a little longer, but the answer, was, as he expected, the same.

“What if you had to choose to save either me or Hardison?”

“Are we on a job?”

“Sure.”

“Do I need your skills or his more to get out?”

“Mine.”

“Then I’d save you.”

_Of course you would_ , he thought. “That’s the difference. If I asked Sophie to choose between you and Hardison, or Nate to choose between Sophie and Maggie, they would freeze. We don’t hesitate.” He, of course, would put the others ahead of himself every time, but it was the same principle.

Parker nodded absently, and lost herself long enough that Eliot thought their conversation might (thankfully) be over. It wasn’t until he stood to clear the table that she blindsided him with another guileless statement, completely out of the blue. “You told me, if I asked, you’d tell me the worst thing you ever did.”

He swore, he would never understand how her mind worked. He thought he had made it clear that he didn’t want to talk about that, with her or anyone, ever. “Are you asking?”

“Yes.”

_Fine. Fucking fine. We’ll do this, then._ She followed him to the sofa, perching on one arm like some kind of oversized bird. “There are three things that are the worst, for different reasons. And I did them all because of Moreau. The thing I’m most ashamed of now is trying to take my own life, about nine years ago, after my first job for him.”

Trying to take his own life wasn’t the worst thing, really. Failing, maybe. But it signified something more, and worse. That was the moment he realized that the fresh-faced farm-boy who had joined up to serve his country was well and truly dead. Normal combat hadn’t fazed him. Even Black Ops, he could tell himself he was doing bad things for good reasons, serving the Greater Good of the US of A. But after? Using hard-won, deadly skills for his own benefit alone, for _money_? Taking dirty jobs when he could say no and walk away? There was no justification for that. He looked in the mirror that day and saw a murderer looking back, for the first time. That man had nothing left to live for, and he hated the woman who found him and saved him before he could bleed to death, bandaging his wounds when he was too weak to stop her. He bared the scars for the thief, who shivered and pressed the knife she _still_ had to her own wrist. In sympathy? He couldn’t bring himself to ask. Not right now. If he did, he would never get through this.

“Nate would say the worst thing I ever did was torture a child to get his father to give me the information I needed. When I had the information, I killed the boy, and let the man go, because my orders were to hurt him in the worst possible way.”

Parker nodded slightly, face blank, eyes… hungry, leaning closer in anticipation of the horror still to come. _Definitely something wrong with her,_ he thought, _fucking sadist_. He steeled himself, and then went on, revealing the thing he knew she would think was the worst he had ever done.

“And… you would say the worst thing I ever did was… I helped kill everyone in a tiny South American village over the age of ten. Orders were to take out anyone who could fight back, but we left a whole town full of orphans in our wake.”

Parker had a thing about orphans. She jerked back, and he couldn’t help but feel the tiniest bit satisfied at wringing a genuine reaction from her. She stared at him for almost a minute, face the unreadable blank it always became when she didn’t know how to express an emotion before she managed to speak. “Why?”

_Why? Why what?_ It hardly mattered. “I ask myself that every goddamn day, Parker. Every. Goddamn. Day.”

“Do you… You feel bad about it? About the things you’ve done?”

“Yes.” He thought that should be obvious by now.

“And that’s why you don’t kill people anymore? Because you feel bad about the things you did for Moreau? And you don’t want to do anything like that again?”

How could he explain that it felt like tearing his soul to ribbons every time he took another life, even in self-defense? That when he picked up that gun in the warehouse, when he killed the men Moreau sent to take Nate out, even that was abhorrent to him? That he still had a conscience, even after years as a hired gun, and he hated himself for every wrong choice he’d ever made, even the ones that seemed right and easy at the time? That each death was heavier than the last? There was no way to make a girl like Parker (a girl who skipped up to him when she heard the warehouse story and kissed him on the cheek with a casual ‘I’m glad you’re not dead’) understand, _truly_ understand, how horrifying it was to hear her summarize it all as ‘feeling bad’ and ‘not wanting’ to do it again. If he tried, she would just blink at him with that too-open stare, wide-eyed and uncomprehending.

But it wasn’t altogether inaccurate, aside from being the understatement of the century.

“Yes,” he shrugged.

She mirrored him. “Okay.”

He waited, again, hoping that she would volunteer the reason for this little chat of theirs, hands shaking slightly as the memories stirred by her question faded away again. “Why are you asking now?” he prompted.

“I…” she began, and then started over. “Do you ever still want to kill people?”

“Sometimes,” he answered evenly. Yes. He hated to admit it, but there was a part of him that still saw killing their enemies as the most effective solution to certain problems, and he hated even more to admit that there was a part of him that craved the rush of ending another man’s life. Those parts of him made him sick, made him hate himself, the monster he turned himself into.

“But… you regret it.”

_Yes_. The raised eyebrow of ‘don’t make me answer stupid questions’ seemed to be enough to prompt Parker to continue.

“We’re not the same, Eliot,” she said, as though this was the simplest, most obvious and reassuring thing in the world. “Yes, we’re the ruthless, pragmatic half of the team, and we know our priorities, but you’re not a bad person, for all you’ve done bad things.”

Of course they weren’t the same. He, for example, couldn’t separate the things he had done from the person he was. He thought that this should be an obvious concept for someone who defined herself as a thief before all else. What you do _is_ who you are, and no one who did the kind of things Eliot Spencer was, in certain circles, infamous for doing, could be anything other than a bad person. “Parker…”

“Don’t ‘ _Parker’_ me!” she snapped, glaring heatedly at the man. “And stop looking at me like I’m too adorable to know what I’m saying.”

“Ah don’t think you _do_ know what you’re sayin’!” he snarled back. That wasn’t what he’d meant at all, but if it came down to it, it was true. “You’ve never seen the kind of suffering I’ve caused, Parker!”

“Says who? I’ve been _everywhere_ , Eliot. I _lived_ the kind of suffering you’ve caused. Isn’t that why you thought I’d say orphaning that village was the worst thing?”

The hitter swallowed hard, biting back a sharp retort. That… was a point. He had no real clue what Parker’s life had been like before she met Archie, but her reaction to orphans, to being touched, the way she could hardly interact with people, and the few tid-bits she had let slip over the years didn’t paint a pretty picture. “Yeah. So where do you get off saying it’s not bad?”

“I’m not saying that! You’re not _listening_. Just because you’ve done bad things doesn’t make you a bad person. We’re _not the same_. That’s what I’m trying to tell you!”

Eliot almost grinned. She sounded, for once, as irritated as she usually made him. Instead he scoffed at her. “So I’m not a bad person, but you are?” He couldn’t imagine in what world that was possible.

“Exactly,” she nodded. Now she sounded, if anything, relieved. “You feel bad about the people you’ve killed. I don’t.” _Wait, what?_ Of all the things Eliot was expecting to hear, that wasn’t one of them. For all he suspected that she could kill without flinching, he didn’t actually realize she had done it.

The thief was still talking, idly spinning his knife on the tip of one finger, then the next. “I know I should. The others would say I should. But I don’t. I mean, I feel kind of bad about the guard in Trinidad, because I messed up. I should have been good enough to get away without hurting him, let alone killing him, but he grabbed me and I panicked. My foster parents… the few bums and older kids who attacked me when I was living on the streets…” She shrugged. “You’re not surprised.”

Eliot crossed his arms and settled back in his seat, concealing the range of emotions flitting across his mind. Surprise was one of them, if only because he didn’t expect even Parker to break into his apartment to eat breakfast and have a heart to heart about murder, but it wasn’t anywhere close to the top of the list. “Nope.”

“I didn’t think you would be. Up in that cave, I thought you were saying you knew.”

Eliot made a face. He should have seen this long ago. He had, in part, but perhaps because of the façade she normally wore, he had overlooked it. “I suspected.”

“How?”

“There’s something wrong with you. No one grows up in the system and on the streets as innocent as you pretend to be.”

“Hey!” she objected. “Team Player Parker really is that innocent!”

The hitter shook his head. Team Player Parker? Sounded like a long con if he’d ever heard of one. _And Sophie thinks you couldn’t lie to save all our lives._ “You were ready to kill us after that first job went south,” he reminded her. “You nearly killed Tara when you thought she betrayed us.”

“Oh, yeah,” she winced. “I forgot about that.”Eliot gave an exasperated sigh, trying to recall the conversation they had had on the subject years before.“You thought she deserved it, right?” He had thought the same thing at the time. If he had been the one on the roof with their substitute grifter, there was a very good chance that she wouldn’t have had a chance to explain herself. “Listen, Parker… You’re not a worse person than I am.” There _were_ people Eliot considered worse than himself, no matter what the rest of the team might think. He had worked alongside them and been one of the best, once upon a time, but they kept going when he quit, and never seemed to think about what they did for a living, let alone regret it. Regardless of what Parker may have seen growing up and wandering the world since, he was confident that she didn’t fall into that category. “Righteous kills and self-defense, even accidents and botched jobs… they aren’t the same as killing for money,” he explained, wishing like hell that he could just say ‘go ask Sophie’ instead. “The kills I regret are the ones that _didn’t_ deserve it, the ones whose lives I ended just because they were in the way and someone else had enough money to ask me to remove them.”

The infuriating girl just snorted.

“What?” he growled.

“You think nobody ever asked the world’s greatest thief to steal a life?” And then she smirked. The expression looked _wrong_ on her face.

“You? An assassin? Seriously?” He raised an eyebrow, even as he reflected that it really wasn’t that surprising. She obviously had the requisite skills to get in, take out the mark, and get out without security any the wiser, and her disconnected isolation from the rest of humanity would make it very easy for her to do so without remorse. It was possibly more surprising that this hadn’t come up before. But perhaps she was keeping it from the others. Sophie and Hardison wouldn’t understand, and Eliot shuddered (metaphorically) to think what Nate might plan if he had a willing assassin on the team.

She shrugged. “Damascus and Istanbul 2004, and Zurich2005 were mine.”

2004 would have made her… twenty-one, Eliot thought, when a witness in protective custody in Istanbul had been slipped cyanide capsules instead of his usual medication for high blood pressure. His whole team had taken notice of that particular hit, wondering  if there was a new player on the field. He didn’t recognize the Damascus hit, but he was certainly familiar with Zurich.

“Gruber was _you_? I thought one of the Germans did it. I turned it down because security was too tight!” Wolf Gruber was a German inventor. Eliot wasn’t sure why, but a price had been put on his head by a trans-European arms-dealing organization. It was very good money, but the German’s Swiss house was a veritable fortress, an old castle updated with the most recent defense technology, and he had holed up there with enough resources to withstand a years-long siege. When he was finally announced dead, a German hitter called Kessler had taken the credit, saying he put a bullet between the mark’s eyes, though according to Quinn, Gruber died of a heart attack and Kessler hadn’t gotten the payout. No one knew who did. It was considered somewhat of a mystery among Eliot’s old contacts.

Parker shrugged again. “Not compared to their vaults. People are hardly ever as well-protected as jewelry. That’s why I only ever stole a few.”

Eliot couldn’t decide which was more disturbing: the idea that she thought of ‘stealing’ a life exactly the same as stealing the Hope Diamond or the First David, or the matter-of-fact tone she used to inform him of their relative level of security. Actually, no, it was the fact that she was more concerned about the relative difficulty in circumventing that security than what she did once security was thwarted. “You’re serious? You’re insane. You don’t kill people for the challenge, Parker!”

“Well, technically, I killed them for the money,” she pointed out, “but it was kind of boring, so I only did it if there was a _lot_ of money. Besides, tazing them is much more fun!” _Fucking sadist_ , Eliot thought, for the second time in ten minutes. “And I’m not insane, Eliot.”

_Not insane my ass!_ She was still playing with the throwing knife, walking it between her fingers, flipping it and palming it as though it wasn’t razor sharp. “You’re fucking crazy. Give me my knife back.”

“But Eliot…” she whined, the first appearance, he realized, of her more usual childish behavior since she had parked herself on his kitchen counter.

Eliot cut her off. “No buts. Hand it over.” His knives were reserved for use by people who hadn’t just admitted to being unrepentant murderers.

“Ugh, fine!” she tossed the blade to him carelessly. He caught it and placed it on the coffee table. “It’s not like I was planning on trying to stab you. It’s not like you’d let me, either.” That was true. She was incredibly sneaky and preternaturally quick, but there was a major difference between lifting someone’s wallet and stabbing them – the latter hurt, and therefore drew attention.  

“Stop fooling around, Parker,” he addressed her playful pout. After re-living the worst things he had done for Moreau and her revelation on her previous employment, he wasn’t in the mood for her usual bullshit. And they had been talking for quite a while without it, which only proved she could stop if she wanted to.

“Fine!” she snapped, sounding irritated again, which Eliot thought might be some sort of a record. “I’ve already said what I thought you needed to hear, but I’ll say it again, because I don’t think you heard me. Contrary to popular belief, I do actually know right from wrong, and good from bad, and you, Eliot Spencer, are not a bad person.” With that, she got up and let herself out, the same way she had come in.

Eliot sat for what seemed like a very long time, thinking over the revelations of the unexpected breakfast conversation and potential motivations for it. He could only come to one (highly dubious) conclusion: _Was she actually trying to_ help _me?_


End file.
